BOOKS . . . ANTS ON THE MELON: 'Ants on the Melon' (Random House; 158 pages; $21) is something of a miracle: the first book of poetry by an 83-year-old woman, sightless now from glaucoma, who resides at a retirement community in Claremont, California. But this slim volume distills a lifetime of writing. A graduate of Mount Holyoke and Radcliffe, Virginia Adair in her green years was considered a poet of promise. Thanks in part to the demands of marriage (in 1937 to the historian Douglass Adair Jr.), motherhood and teaching, she stopped publishing but kept on writing. Literary fame meant nothing; her delight was in the solitary pleasure of creation. The 87 poems in 'Ants on the Melon' are a fraction of her oeuvre, which runs into the thousands. Occasional verse for such magazines as the Atlantic and the New Yorker has earned Adair in recent years a coterie of fans (other poets notable among them). One dazzled critic (Eric Ormsby) has called her "the best American poet since Wallace Stevens." "Adair is less gnomic than Stevens," says TIME's John Elson, "more passionately personal; even on dark themes, her writing, like his, has the elegant fizz of brut champagne." One terrible night in 1968 Douglass Adair, then a teacher at the Claremont colleges, walked into their bedroom and killed himself. His widow's agony and incomprehension, in poems reflecting lost love, all but leap from page to reader's eye.
'Doing Well By Doing Good'
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WASHINGTON, D.C.: In an effort to promote corporate responsibility, President Clinton brought 100 top business executives to the White House to demonstrate to them that companies "can do well by doing good." The executives heard from a dozen companies the President spotlighted as good corporate citizens that have excelled at creating family-friendly workplaces, offering generous health-care and retirement benefits and upgrading worker skills. Clinton is trying to support the needs of American workers at a time when corporate profits are skyrocketing and wages are stagnating. The issue came to the forefront in January, when AT&T laid off 40,000 workers, and promptly saw its stock price rise. Just this week, ConAgra's stock rose nearly 18 percent the day after announcing 6,500 layoffs. TIME Business Editor Bill Saporito reports that companies will keep downsizing as long as they see their profit margins rise. "As Clinton hands out awards, the same old stuff keeps happening," Saporito says. "You're not going to put an end to restructuring as long as companies continue to be in the mode to redeploy assets. The question is how to do it fairly. That's what this conference tried to address." Clinton avoided calls from the left, including his own Labor Secretary Robert Reich, to take a more activist approach to combating stagnating wages and job insecurity. Earlier this year, Reich advocated reforming the tax code to reward corporations that avoid layoffs by retraining workers, among other things. Clinton, eager to distance himself from the big-government label, is urging companies to take these steps voluntarily. Saporito says that will only happen when companies realize that worker-friendly policies can help the profit margin. "Corporations will change when they see other companies getting a return on their investment," Saporito says. "It makes sense to have a loyal and dedicated work force and not treat workers like replaceable parts. As companies discover the payback, they will begin to make changes." feelings of guilt, betrayal, failure, vengefulnessthese can also be found in something like 95 percent of all country songs written by people who were never married to Julia Roberts," says TIME's Richard Corliss. "But only about 5 percent are as potent as the tunes here one you can square-dance to."